


Gravity

by Sigridhr



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M, astronomy nerd númenorian ladies, crack science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 14:30:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1431922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sigridhr/pseuds/Sigridhr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She says her name is Zimraminal. Then she tells him to get out, as she has important work to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> Super duper thanks to Elleth, who gave me tremendous help with naming and put up with a lot of my incoherent babble. <3

**i.** **Ingress**

 

She says her name is Zimraminal. Then she tells him to get out, as she has important work to do. Elros is too taken aback to be anything else at the time, and his quick glance around the room can’t make sense of the myriad of papers covered in graphs and figures, pages of notes, and _it_ , a long, thick piece of polished metal that nearly fills the room, stretching up through the roof. He’s never seen anything like it, and it puzzles him.

But, late at night, it is _her_ he remembers.

She has surprisingly little patience for questions. She moves quickly, talking even faster, as if she is always pressed for time. It is a kind of reckless rush that is so singularly mortal it makes Elros’ chest ache to watch. But he’s relentlessly curious about her, and her work. He finds himself wandering up the hill to her observatory, as she calls it, in the moments he can spare.

“What does this do?” he finds himself asking over and over, and she answers, in short, sharp sentences that always seem to raise yet more questions.

“I am observing the brightness of the stars,” Zimraminal says. 

“What for?” 

“Do you have nothing better to do, your majesty?” 

He looks at her equipment, and then back at her. “There are few things on this island I find as inexplicable as,” he pauses, making an odd gesture of stupefaction, “whatever it is you’re doing here.”

She purses her lips, looking intently at him, and then down at her chart. Then she turns her chair towards him, with a sigh, resting her chin on her hands. “You understand basic laws of gravity, do you not?”

He blinks, startled by the question. “I understand the theory, yes.”

Zimraminal snorts in a way that is much more derisive than he’s used to receiving from anyone but Elrond. She holds up two hands. “This,” she says, lifting her left hand, “is a star. And this.” She raises the other one. “Is a planet.”

Elros frowns, but she ignores him and carries on, moving her right hand in a wide circle around her left, which makes a smaller circle in synch. “The motion of the planet around the star changes the star’s position as they orbit around their centre of mass.”

“What are you talking about?” Elros cuts in. 

“I thought you said you understood the theory,” she says, looking down her nose at him in exasperation. “The laws of gravity state –“

“I meant about planets around stars. There are no planets around other stars.”

She leans forwards, her elbows pressing into her knees, and her eyes are bright with starlight. “There are,” she says, reverently. “I have seen them.”

He sits up straight, his stomach twisting in discomfort. “What you are talking about goes against the known facts of the universe.”

“ _Gravity_ is a known fact,” she says, firmly. “And I have _seen_ it.”

“My father, Eärendil, rises into the heavens each night like a star,” Elros says sharply, rising to his feet. “I assure you there are no planets about him.” 

For the first time since he’s met her, he sees her sag in on herself, and her cheeks flush. “I am sorry, your majesty. I meant no offense.” 

“Then you should cease this –“

She cuts him off. “I have seen him. I have a portable telescope. I have seen him as he rises sometimes. Would you like to see?”

His heart beats frantically in his chest, and he finds himself at a loss for words. He can do little but nod stiffly as she bustles about, pulling out an elegant bronze telescope and setting it up outside. Then, she gently takes him by the arm and leads him to a chair.

At first when he looks through the telescope he sees nothing but the inky black sky, and he thinks that it is broken. But before he can say anything he catches sight of it – a form distant, but unmistakably of a ship, rising gracefully into the sky, a solitary cloud like waves breaking upon its prow. 

Zimraminal is silent as he sits, his hands grasping the telescope so tightly that his knuckles go white, pressing his eye into the view piece so hard it hurts. He sits back after his father has drifted past his sight, and turns to look at her.

She’s staring up at the sky, her face curiously devoid of expression, a thick and distinctly worn blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

“Can I come back tomorrow?” he asks.

“I’ll teach you how to set it up on your own,” she says flatly. “I have other things to do than freeze outside with you every night.”

To his surprise, he laughs.

 

**ii.** **Eclipse**

 

He’s not sure precisely when he became her assistant, but he realizes that an assistant is precisely what he is when she starts barking orders at him and asking him to duplicate her notes.

“I have already calculated a large planet, with a mass approximately three hundred times that of our own. This should allow me to confirm it.” She is carefully plotting dots on a chart. “As the planet passes in front of the star, it blocks some of the light – so I can confirm that there is _something_ there, and the _something_ causing the changes in the radial velocities of the stars I’ve been observing is a planet-like object.”

“Lady Zimraminal –,” Elros begins.

She gives him a look. “If you’re going to say something infuriating, please save your dogma for after I’ve completed this. I have waited _years_ for enough clear nights in a row to catch a planetary transit.”

 “But what you are suggesting contradicts what has been set down by the Valar.”

“The Valar,” Zimraminal says, making a mark on her graph with such force the paper nearly tears, “have never said anything about _other_ planets. And the laws of gravity are observable, consistent and constant. I have the evidence of my eyes, and the evidence of my instruments, and they both tell me that there is more out there than we have ever imagined.”

Elros shifts uncomfortably, but the evidence is there on the table before him, in the graph she is so carefully constructing. And he has learnt to see it, the movement of stars in the heavens, and he is afraid.

“I am not contradicting the Valar,” she says soothingly. “But I will not turn my gaze back to the ground.” 

He sits down silently beside her, and begins copying her notes. She smiles at him then, wide and conspiratorial, and he is breathless, caught up in something unfathomably big.

He has walked nearly half a millennium upon this world, and never has he felt so very small.

 

**iii. Egress**

“Who built this? Your father?” he asks, as Zimraminal records data in neat little rows in her notebook, methodically pulling apart the threads of a world he’d thought he’d understood with rigidly regular pen strokes.

She stops and stares at him. “ _I_ built it,” she says, as if it were obvious. “My father has no interest in the stars.” 

“Forgive me,” he says at once, and it seems to mollify her a little, but he can sense the brittle edges of her pride still erect and jagged, ready to rake him if he missteps again. “Your father is dead, is he not?”

She replies in a deliberately toneless voice. “You know all the nobles in your court, your highness, you must know he is not among them.”

“Neither are you,” Elros points out.

“No,” she says flatly. “I never cared much for rubbing shoulders.”

“Perhaps you will find it more amenable now,” Elros says, taking a seat and twirling a pen between his thumb and forefinger. “The nobles of my court are my friends, as I believe, are you.”

“Are we?” she asks, looking up at him. “Friends?”

“I had thought we were,” Elros replies slowly. “Am I mistaken?”

“That depends. Why are you here?”

She leans forwards towards him, and he can see she looks uncertain. “I had thought,” she says, “that perhaps…” She inches forward again, in a movement unmistakable in its invitation. 

He gently takes her hand in his, tracing his thumb across the back of it. “Yes,” he admits, “perhaps that too.”

She kisses him, pulling him forwards and almost out of his chair. He doesn’t mind.

 

**iv.** **No Eclipse**

 

Her first child is a son, and he is bright and reckless, and she spends more time than she’d like pulling him out of trees. But there is also no mistaking that he takes after his father. 

Her second child, however, is a daughter. She names her Tindómiel, in a language she has adopted by never felt at home in. She lets the world call her Menelmírë, a name that seems as much the trappings of her husbands position as does the work that comes with it.

It takes several years to negotiate, and several more to re-negotiate after her children are born, how to handle her responsibilities as Queen, as the observatory is never far from her thoughts, and her work never grows less pressing.

But Tindómiel, who she named after the stars she loves, is bright eyed and clever, and her chubby fingers grasp the telescope even as Zimraminal adjusts it for her, ever straining to reach up beyond what can be seen. It follows unsurprisingly that it is her daughter she is closest to, who learns how to shape the glass and carefully assemble the telescopes, who sits up late at night with her in the cold, until Elros comes wandering up to bring them both home. 

And, when her daughter is old enough, she sits her on her lap and shows her that first planet she found, and they watch as it transits its star.

“Someday, perhaps, we’ll reach it,” Zimraminal says.

“But how are they made?” Tindómiel asks. “The planets and the stars? What are they made from?”

The lives of stars are beyond her grasp, but not, she thinks, as she watches Tindómiel carefully trace the path of the graph with her finger, beyond the grasp of her daughter.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> So, for this to make any sort of sense, one probably has to imagine that Arda does revolve around a sun, and that Vinglot is a satellite in orbit.


End file.
